Off the cliff stood Mt. Hakase in all its glory, a tall, proud monument of ages past. Like a lion announcing its greatness to the world, it roared, roared with wind and thunder, its beastly mane of trees and broken-down bots quaking and trembling under the might of its very name. Pico had once feared the thunder, but these days it calmed her. In these days, bad weather was the law, and thunder was like a guardian demon, a watchdog: that one ill-tempered friend who you could always count on to be angry as all hell. It felt nice to be able to count on a few things, even if they weren't necessarily nice things.
"Hey, Peekhole. Spare a few bullets? I'm clean out." Her acquaintance, Buzz. Fourth-generation make, like herself, so he had that same sleek, curved sort of build to him. She always wondered how he wound up with that rusty shade of orange for coating—not to say it didn't suit him well—but in the interest of polite conversation she never asked.
"Oh, um, yes, of course." She unscrewed her gun cap and emptied out half her ammunition. Buzz was always out of bullets, but, again in the interest of polite conversation, she never mentioned it.
Buzz took the bullets over his head and drank them in like a bottle of beer. Pico could hear them clink-clank down into his arm, and it made her feel kind of gross inside. "Owe ya one." He always said that, and she was starting to wonder when she would get to collect on this supposed debt of "ones" that he owed her. This was another of the things she didn't mention in the interest of good manners. Pico liked to think of herself as the sociable sort, but in all honesty she didn't talk much. The moment never seemed opportune.
Buzz slapped her on the back. "No need to be a stranger, we're all fighting the same war here." He cocked his gun and rattled his lazy way back to the mess hall. "Quit standin' around on the front line," he called back. "You'll get yourself shot clean down."
"Oh, um, sorry." Pico stepped back a bit from the cliff, a cursory measure to be sure. She didn't much care. If she was to be shot down one day she'd much rather it be earlier than later. At least if she were taken today she knew no one would really miss her. The only community she'd ever known was the army, and they had all the compassion of kidney stones. And for the most part, they were about as pleasant to pass along.
Seven hundred years, she thought to herself, gazing out over the mountain's barren foothills and shaking her head. The majority of these droids had been fighting the Shinonome war for over seven hundred years, and not a grain of wisdom had come of it all. It was always, "make 'em work, and if they don't work, they're broken, and if they're broken, throw 'em away." The thought made her sick to her core processor.
Pico turned away from the cliff and wandered back inside, over toward a row of empty docking stations at the bar, to sit down for awhile. The bar was always empty. Because they kept firing all the drunks, she reminded herself. It was a stupid rule, and it made her wonder why they had a bar in the first place if no one was allowed to drink at it. If they wanted to weed out the subversives, she thought, there were easier and more precise ways to do it.
On the counter of the bar was a centuries-old newspaper, stained with oil and gasoline from some sloppy fellow who'd probably had too much to drink. It was a wonder the poor thing survived—the newspaper, that is. There was a picture of a little old lady—notably a human one, probably Asian—in handcuffs, being coerced at gunpoint down a dark hallway by a man in a brown suit-jacket, likely a general of the human army. The headline read, in ancient Japanese, "Prof. Shinonome receives dishonorable discharge. Human race devastated."
Pico sighed and pushed the newspaper aside to lay down her elbow and rest her head in her claw. She wasn't much fonder of humans than the next bot, but she had to admit they ran things relatively well. When a human was dismissed from its army, they called it a "discharge." Sure, it may not have been a friendly process, but even so, the human had the pleasure of going home and seeing its family again. Not so for robots, who had no family to return to.
She could hear the metallic screams from the other room, and the crackling of the flame, and the flurry of hammers like heavy rain. No, not so for robots. A robot which couldn't serve its race wasn't "discharged." It was "fired," and when they said "fired," they meant it literally. Into the fire with the defectives, into the fire to melt them down into more metal, to sculpt more innocent bots and pull them into this mess, too. And when they wouldn't fight either, melt them down all the same, and keep trying 'til you found someone with a heart as bitter and callous as your own. Pico plugged up her microphones in hopes of silencing the echoes in her head.
After about a minute, the noise stopped. The hammers lifted, the fire doused, and thus marked the end of what was, for some poor mechanically gifted models, literally the daily grind. Pico gasped in relief. She had to consider sometimes, what did she know about right from wrong? Only a fifth-year, after all. In a crowd like this, she was nothing special. There were hundreds others like her. She was a pretty blue color, but that was just about the only peculiarity she had going for her.
Just a bright blue bot, she thought to herself. The thought comforted her. Just a bright blue bot in a bleak bot-eat-bot world. Her elbow slid across the table, and her head collapsed in the musty embrace of the worn newspaper, and she started to drift off to sleep. She almost smiled.